For someone like me living abroad, the most galling aspect of the recent election debacle is having to deal with foreigners who assume that any right-thinking American must have supported Obama, and that since yours truly is obviously a right-thinking person who happens to be an American (by birth anyway), congratulations are in order. The Japanese are so childishly naïve in these matters, mindlessly absorbing liberal media propaganda with the same credulous assiduity they would apply to college entrance examinations, that it’s pointless to get upset with them or even try to set them straight. It would be like trying to argue political and economic theory with a bright six-year old who had been taught to recite the Communist Manifesto by heart.

What really gets me, though, is the non-American whites who seem to assume that American whites, as the preeminent white people in the world, have some moral duty to atone for the global sins of the white man. It’s the whole SWPL thing of getting working-class and redneck whites to pay the price for what elite whites see as the sins of the white race, but taken to a whole other level. Whereas the designated scapegoat whites in the U.S. rightly sense the injustice of the charge against them, their counterparts in other English-speaking countries feel themselves exempted from the charges leveled against (what should be) their American brethren, and gleefully join in the piling on. The Australians and the Irish seem to be especially egregious in this regard. The former with their convict origins and rough-and-ready working-class ethos, the latter with their eternal grievance against the English invader, fancy themselves comrades of the downtrodden Negro, and imagine that by identifying with those most perfect of all victims, they can exact a more perfect revenge against the hated English toffs and poms. For them it’s still Gallipoli or Drogheda, and Mitt Romney is just the latest incarnation of Churchill or Cromwell.

This got me to thinking, and it occurred to me that the reason so many foreigners — I’m thinking primarily Australians, Japanese, English, French (but not Irish) — are so invested in the narrative of Obama as the blue (black) knight slaying the red (white) dragon is that they see it as a way to painlessly expiate their own supposed sins against non-whites or the other. American whites are to selflessly take on the role of sacrificial victim to atone for all the sins of global oppressors from time immemorial. This explains why their enthusiasm for Obama is not accompanied by the same venomous hostility to whites that characterizes American leftists. The Japanese, in particular, seem to view American whites as noble figures of almost godlike forbearance and selflessness who have had the unprecedented honor of being given the starring role in this great global drama of vicarious atonement. Any American white who is so boorish as so forego this opportunity for world-historic martyrdom will no doubt be viewed with the same disappointment as was Captain Cook by the Hawaiian islanders once they realized he was no god but merely a flesh-and-blood human like themselves.

Now when I receive the congratulations of foreigners on the ascension of Obama, I suppress a glower, put on my archest of arch looks, and treat them to the following: “Yeah, I’ve heard that all around the world the success of Obama has inspired people to start forming new political parties to follow in his footsteps. For example, in Australia there’s this new party that insists that the next prime minister be an Aborigine. In Japan, that he be Korean-Japanese (and that the governor of Hokkaido be Ainu). In Spain, a Basque. Most surprisingly, and inspiringly, they’re pushing for the next president to be a Christian! I’m sure you all are going to want to join these new movements. After all, you wouldn’t want to be a racist, would you?”